Ulla Persson and Barbro Jonsson teach at Östra gymnasiet Umeå, in Sweden. For a couple of years their school and school partners from Denmark and Latvia worked on a project focusing on energy. Its name is "Energy around the Baltic Sea" and it aimed to teach students how to save energy and what energy production and consumption is. The project also encompassed three other themes: energy sources, renewable energy, and environmental education.
The three partner schools from Denmark, Latvia and Sweden worked together during three years with topics covering sustainable society themes. The partner teachers aimed to match the following pedagogical goals: working with problem-based learning, introducing IT technology to enable classes to present the progress of their work, to work in a democratic way with cross-curricular school subjects and to get to know other cultures and to developing understanding.
The concrete project topics involved mobility, emigration, water, new technologies, ethical questions and good neighbourhood, all in relation to energy, the broad project theme.
All schools designed energy questions to survey local communities. The results were presented in Umeå, Sweden. Differences and similarities in the political choice of energy were discussed and compared. Students listed similarities and differences to understand the background of the political choices.
Later on, each school considered different questions concerning sustainable society. The presentation of the results took place in Copenhagen and focused on Agenda 21. In the third year, the participating classes took into discussion energy effects on the Baltic Sea. Different choices of environmental issues concerning energy were investigated by all schools.
During the project evaluation the students' feedback gave an interesting picture of the diversity of what they learned. The overall picture is that it has been a positive experience for the great majority and they enjoyed meeting peers from other countries and learning something about each other.
The three partner schools from Denmark, Latvia and Sweden worked together during three years with topics covering sustainable society themes. The partner teachers aimed to match the following pedagogical goals: working with problem-based learning, introducing IT technology to enable classes to present the progress of their work, to work in a democratic way with cross-curricular school subjects and to get to know other cultures and to developing understanding.
Later on, each school considered different questions concerning sustainable society. The presentation of the results took place in Copenhagen and focused on Agenda 21. In the third year, the participating classes took into discussion energy effects on the Baltic Sea. Different choices of environmental issues concerning energy were investigated by all schools.
